Under the weather

“Under the weather.”   An odd phrase, that, but ever so much nicer than saying “I feel like crap.”  It’s  not a bad description of how we can sometimes feel:  as though dark, heavy clouds are sitting directly over our heads.

To be honest, I feel as though those clouds have established themselves  inside my head at the moment.  

I caught a cold eleven days ago.  You know, sore throat, runny nose, no voice, all that.  Nothing fancy, just the usual virus everyone gets now and again.

I actually haven’t had a cold  in about five years, so I’d forgotten how nasty the common cold can feel.

Common it may be, but comfortable it’s not.

I can’t take the over-the-counter medications available to give cold sufferers an easier time of it, so my immune system and I are on our own.  Fight we do, but it’s not an easy battle. In fact, most of the colds I’ve had in the past have morphed into bronchitis, pneumonia or asthma within a few days of setting up housekeeping in my system.

This one (knock on wood) doesn’t seem to be playing that tune.

This time the contents of my head finally seem to be slowly but surely being ejected into the cartons of Kleenex I’m going through. It’s definitely a battle, because this nasty, gluey stuff doesn’t want to go anywhere.  It wants to stay stuck to my brain, gobbling up any errant thought process that might venture into its territory.

Worse yet is getting rid of the goop that has emigrated down into my throat.  Spitting it out it out looks easy enough when other people do it, but unfortunately I never mastered the technique. Instead, my swallow mechanism kicks in–and down it goes.

What my digestive system thinks of this approach is pretty clear:  it doesn’t care for it at all. Groans and gurgles issue forth, and my appetite takes a nose dive.  My energy level is nil.  I wake up a hundred times a night to cough…and swallow.  Eew.

But still, it’s just a cold.  No struggling to breathe, no rushing to Emergency for oxygen and whatever they give you to open the airways, no penicillin.  None of that.  Just a regular, normal, icky cold.

I’ll take it.

And when I’m finished being “under the weather,” I’ll be back!

Namaste,
Susannah